Sara Letmanski is spending no more her senior high school lacrosse career around the sidelines. In April, the Glenbard West replica designer handbags senior took a keep to the back from the head wholesale replica handbags and remained having a concussion so severe that weeks later, she was still being dizzy and responsive to bright light.
It was the replica designer handbags second wholesale fake designer handbags time Letmanski, cheap replica handbags 17, had a break down concussion playing lacrosse, she said, and it came after she had tried wearing a padded headband as protection, simply to discard it as impractical.
"My goggles couldn't fit regarding this correctly," said Letmanski, wearing black sunglasses in mild morning sunshine fake designer bags as her team ready for a game title. "And it can't cover where I normally get hit."
Lacrosse is a sport that involves flailing metal sticks along with a hard rubber ball that may be hurled at speeds cheap replica designer handbags over 100 mph. But while the violent style of the men's game requires players to safeguard their bodies with pads as well as their heads with helmets, the women's game, made to be less rough, calls for only safety goggles and mouth guards.
That difference has become a matter of controversy as public concern grows over sports-related concussions. Two state legislators in lacrosse-crazy Maryland introduced a bill this year to want helmets but withdrew it after coaches protested the measure would change a game title of speed and dexterity into a contest of brute force
Some Chicago-area coaches share that opinion, though they worry that mounting cheap replica designer handbags pressure will someday turn the women's version of the game into something similar to the men's.
"The beauty of the girls game is it's a lot more finesse, not bodies slamming and slashing and stick violations," said Peter Bogle, who coaches a co-op team in St. Charles. "My take is once you start with a helmet, girls are likely to think, 'Now I can go harder.'"
That's what some observers believe happened in 2004, when U.S. Lacrosse, the sport's governing body, began requiring female players to put on goggles designed to prevent fake designer handbags eye injuries.
"It became a little more of the physical game," said Evanston Township Senior high school coach Sarah McKenna. "Girls were taking checks a little closer to the head than usual, purely because players were thinking, 'Oh, she's protected.' Next, the refs replica designer handbags got more involved and also the game returned to normalcy."
The 2004 change happened in the midst of a fourfold rise in the reported concussion rate among high school girls lacrosse players. Ann Carpenetti, managing director of game administration for U.S. Lacrosse, wholesale fake designer handbags said the reason why for your aren't clear, though suspicions center on rougher play as well as increased vigilance about the injury.
The guidelines of ladies lacrosse allow athletes to wear soft headgear for example padded headbands and "scrum caps" thin foam helmets donned by a few rugby players to prevent cuts. Carpenetti, though, said there's no evidence to suggest that such equipment reduces the chance of concussions.
"If we will come with an allowance saying you can wear fake designer handbags soft headgear, there exists a responsibility to analyze it," she said.
That resulted in an experiment conducted this past year by Joseph Crisco, a professor fake designer handbags of orthopedics at Brown University. Following research that found that most concussions within the girls game would be the consequence of cheap replica handbags sticks to the head, he invited young players to his lab to whack a crash dummy head with lacrosse sticks so he could appraise the impact of their blows.
The girls hit the top with enough contentration to bend wholesale fake designer handbags their aluminum sticks, a show of force Crisco said would rarely occur in the real world, but the average impact was only about 70 around the Gadd Severity Index, fake designer handbags a measurement replica designer handbags produced by the auto industry to calculate traumatic brain injuries like a fractured cranium or internal bleeding.
This is a pretty low number; football helmets are made wholesale replica handbags to withstand impacts as high as 1,200 GSI, that protection that stops fake designer handbags about 95 percent of catastrophic head injuries. However, Crisco said that doesn't tell the full story.
Concussions, he noted, aren't detected through physical evidence just like a cracked skull wholesale replica handbags but through symptoms for example headache, amnesia and confusion. Much about the injury remains unknown, such as the force required to produce one.
"We realize that helmets don't control (all) concussions," he said. "Whether they can reduce the number in girls lacrosse, we don't know the answer to that. They would reduce the harshness of impact, but we do not determine if that might be enough."
Nonetheless, U.S. Lacrosse is likely to draft technical standards for female protective headgear. That should be done by early 2014, Carpenetti said, allowing sports companies to develop models that, with luck, may be available by 2016.
She added, however, that they expects any new headgear to remain optional for that foreseeable future.
"I don't think there is a silver bullet," she said. "Nobody thinks there's a silver bullet to concussions."
Parents like Mark Rossi wholesale fake designer handbags are still dreaming about one.
He was on the sidelines to watch his daughter Madison, 16, play for Barrington High School in a recent game wholesale fake designer handbags against Glenbard West in Glen Ellyn. The experience got a bit rough official Wayne Pukala called numerous fouls for players waving their sticks "in the sphere," or within 7 inches of an opponent's head and Rossi said hello demonstrated the need for some type of safeguard.
"There is some kind of head protection that needs to be worn," he said. "I have no idea what it's, but they're just too exposed. There's a lot wholesale replica handbags of sticks and flying balls."
Moments later, Barrington senior Maggie DelVecchio collapsed on the grass, felled in what seemed cheap replica designer handbags to be a stick to the head. She got up after a couple of scary seconds, and then said her face had only been grazed (she seemed to be struck in the goggles during the game but wasn't hurt by that, either).
Despite her scrapes, DelVecchio, 18, said she didn't want to change the game to mollify concussion fears.
"I understand where it's coming from, but I feel that girls lacrosse is much more of a finesse game," she said. "It's about body positioning and not so much stick contact. Adding helmets would certainly completely go ahead and take focus off of that. It might almost allow it to be seem OK to be more reckless with your stick."
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